The Human Race: Children Learning through Making Mistakes

It was as I held a plastic milk carton that I remembered the damage plastics do to the environment and indeed to us, wondering how our world would be today if plastic had not been invented; our oceans would be much cleaner, the fish healthier, landfill would be far less and our bodies would less polluted by damaging chemicals. I believe in time plastic will be banned because of the noxious harm it causes, which has not been fully acknowledged yet, and I am trying to minimise the use of it in my own life, not always successfully. We humans have made so many mistakes, and throughout our known history this has been so. The development of plastic, pesticides and herbicides, the careless industrial revolution, colonialism, missionaries, slavery, and religious bigotry, for example, all in hindsight can be seen to have been flawed in their inception and damaging in their outcomes, but at the time, no doubt, the concepts seemed desirable and commendable. They were partial or total mistakes, and while we continue to make miscalculations, usually we have learned from the faults of the past and do not repeat them in quite the same way. Children too learn from their mistakes, and I cringe as I remember swatting flies and killing spiders when young, and not noticing all the riches of nature that were around me then, many of which have disappeared forever due to the actions of man. Just as children learn wisdom in the course of their life, humanity is on a steep learning curve to reach its own level of discernment at the perfect time for the development of the Planet. In planetary terms humanity and indeed Earth herself are adolescents - though Earth is young in body but not in understanding, unlike the human race which is immature in both. Whatever humanity does as we practise, err and learn may wound but cannot destroy Gaia, and in time the mistakes will be as nothing. As you observe the plastic in your kitchen, as I did this morning, you may wish to smile at this example of yet another child-like human blunder and know that, in the end, it does not matter, for we are only children.]]>